The Sad State of Web Design in our Fair Pittsburgh

Originally Posted on February 2, 2007Last Updated on March 21, 2007

So, granted, as a Web Designer and my own little company, this article is bound to be incredibly skewed and opinionated, what with me being amazing and everyone else out there wearing a capital Suck t-shirt, but I can’t help noticing how awful the Web design options are in Pittsburgh.

Now, I know there are alot of good designers in the city, those who adhere to Web Standards and make beautiful, often accessible sites. But they’re not coming up in the search results. Google’s top 10 for web design pittsburgh pa are a motley bunch of unattractive and more importantly, less skilled companies.

In the modern world of Website designing and building, it’s common knowledge that you don’t use tables. They make your site very hard to read on anything other than a computer screen, they hurt your dearly with the search engines, and they’re just generally bad practice. In fact, if all you do is create your site without using tables, then at least you could call yourself a professional. Anything less is definitely very amateur… Let’s have a look at companies in Google’s top 10 (I excluded results to directory listings such as Superpages.com) as mentioned above and where they stand with respect to three fields: Web Standards (but much more basic for the purposes of this review, 2 points if you use CSS to layout your pages, 0 if you’re still using tables), Design (0 points for bad design, 1 point for decent and 2 points for really good, as determined by my professional taste and opinion) and Content (0 points for poor content, 1 point for relevent content). So therefore 0 = horrible and 5 = excellent, per this scale.

So only two sites out of seven even meet the table-free design requirements. This simply blows my mind, and I wonder if it’s for a lack of talent in Pittsburgh or just a lack of marketability with Google. Any thoughts?